Why was "The Ballymun Housing Scheme" a failure?

I’m not an architect but I think three main reasons. The heroin epidemic of the 1980s is the main one, a lack of suitable facilities for people in the area and just poor design: large open green spaces seemed like a good idea at the time, instead dense housing settlement should have taken place all around smaller green spaces as this has been found to discourage anti-social behaviour. A knock on problem from the failure of the old ballymun is it gave high rise a bad name in Dublin and that is a legacy the city continues to live with.

Jdivision – You must have been writing a reply at the same time as myself. The ‘thinks’ bit was in no way aimed at you just stressing a need to ground such a thesis in evidence based findings. That said, increasing the density, all things being equal, is no guarantee of success. Ballymum as everybody knows is actually low-medium density. Darndale would be much higher density .. no great success. Its how a neighbourhood is put together – socaially, economicially and physically that makes it work or not. Ballymum was something of a diaster on all fronts.

Jaz – Suggest you go out to Ballymum and get the residents perspective – not just an academic one. Again be careful of partial surveys. Good luck – Shane

Regarding the ‘thinks’ versus ‘facts’ argument above, while obviously a good thesis will be based on fact, it might also be a good idea to consider having a chapter on the effects of popular perception and how the Ballymun project was perceived by society (perception would have had an impact on things such as employment etc – the old argument about not getting a job despite your qualifications just because of your address). Certainly, it might be worth considering this issue as it definately informed the public and media image of the project.

It seems to me like Ballymun was never maintained the way it should have been. All I can remember is them doing a bit of work on one smaller block a few years ago. I am glad to see them going.

The thesis title is a loaded question, assuming that the scheme failed.

There are two ways a project can be said to be a failure
A. If it fails to meet its goals (objective failure)
B. If it is seen to be a failure by those affected (subjective failure)

To measure objective failure you’d have to discover what the goals of the original project were or if there were any. You would also have to ask whether it was worse or better than other public housing schemes. Maybe the answer is that public housing was a failure and Ballymun was the highest profile public housing scheme.

Subjective failure is measured by asking people (residents, state, people from other parts fo the city) whether and why it failed.

@Cute Panda wrote:

My family moved in to Thomas Clarke Tower in 1970. I know a lot of people may not beleive this, but for many of the early residents moving to Ballymun was like going to heaven in the early days. People had tremedous pride and felt so positive about living there. We lived there for a few years and then to a larger flat on Shangan Avenue.

I can tell you for a fact why Ballymun “failed”:

1) Refugee Camp Mentality – Like Tallaght and Neilstown about a decade later, working class Dubliners were considered vermin by the rural ethos of this Irish state. Working class Dubliner were to be removed from the vista of the gaelic aspirations of the Irish state filled with its rural TDs and Civil Servants who created “housing schemes” and more or less ethnically cleansed traditional Dublin working class neighbourhoods in the city centre and deported them en-masse to Ballymun. Once there they were left to rot and neglected.

If you were from Ballymun Flats and had an issue pretaining to anything you needed repaired in the Flats chances are you encoutered some roasary bead mauling biddy from Mayo in the Corpo on Jervis Street who treated you as if you were honoured to have her even look sneeingly at you.

2) Abandondment – Once in Ballymun we were expected to fend for ourselves. While the Government ploughed vast sums into GAA clubs and Farmers Co-ops from Donegal to Kerry, the same did not apply to people in Ballymun (or any part of urban Ireland for that matter). We did not fit the image of the barefoot maidens dancing at the crossroads and represented a uncomfortable reminder that Ireland was hardly the mono-cultural farming fantasyland the guardians of the state whished it to be.

3) Decay – If you are not going to develop a community then you are hardly going to fix it up when it starts falling apart. (I mean this in every sense, social and economic)

4) Bad timing. Ballymun gets built…arab oil crises leading to massive ecnomic downturn…heroin shows up. One mess after the next.

5) The Oirish problem with buildings over 4 stories. “Ye don’t see them yokes in Mayo, so deas must be bad news!” – this still prevails. But not as bad as it used to be.

6) Tallaght and Neilstown – The community in Ballymun collasped when most of them moved enmasse to West Dublin in the early to mid 1980’s in most cases to much worse circumstances. Even they believe that a coal fire in a freezing house in the middle of nowhere was better than 24×7 free hot water and central heating in Ballymun Flat for no other reason that “it’s a house”.

7) No jobs in Ballymun and terrible public transport led to a situation were the ones who were left isolated and unable to get back into life. Middle class orgaisations such as the Labour Party and SIPTU never expressed an interest in the people of Ballymun. The Trade Unions members were too busy having the name of their street changed from Ballymun Ave to “Glasnevin Ave”. This is why people in Ballymun have always rejected the so called working class lobbies such as the Trade Unions and the Labour Party as we saw them for the phonies they were.

Now having said all this, Ireland is a much better country now and is a much more mature society. Ballymun is for all it faults has a place of fantastic community spirit which unless you have come face to face with it – is hard for an outsider to believe. It really is something eles how people in Ballymun look after each other. The hatred of working class Dubliners is no longer an agenda of the Irish Government and civil service – and the Ballymun Regeneration Project proves this.

To sum up, I think that Ballymun “failed” in an Irish social sense because it was perhaps too modern for the Dev’s Holy Catholic Rural Ireland and it created a negative reaction to the Irish, who think people can only live in bungalows on an acre of land. I think if Ballymun was built today, it would have got a lot more TLC from Irish Government and society as a whole. A freind of mine who stills lives there once summed it up beautifully. “If we want to make the rest of Ireland respect and cherish Ballymun then paint the flats white and tatch the roof of the towers”.

Ireland was not ready for the Ballymun Flats when they were first built.

BEST POST EVER !. CP-can you provide some lessons on candid social commentary to some of the more
narratively challenged posters on this site 🙂

There’s yer thesis there J83. Are you just fishing for info or have you definitely chosen this as your topic?. What are you studying?. If this is an undergrad thesis you are biting off way more than you can chew with such a loaded term as failed.

FWIW there is a load of journal articles out there concerning Ballymun’s genesis and history. There is also a very fine book called Estates on the Edge in Bolton St. library that would be very useful. It looks at the problems of poorly designed housing schemes on urban peripheries across Europe, not just Ballymun

The fear of under-representing the rural community strikes so piercingly at the heart of RT

Yes Graham, Ballymun had piped TV from the start. In the begining there was a UHF deflector on the top of James Connolly Tower and this picked up signals from the UK and they were “piped” into all the flats. There was no UTV in the early days on HTV as the ITV station as the aerial pointed across the Irish sea.

You are correct about the decline, it’s always a spiral, and then the “sinking ship” mentality kicks in. You are also stigmatised for where you come from with the most repugnant snobbery which you find hard can shake off . For instance, when I did my leaving cert I wanted to study Electronic Engineering at Kevin Street, so worried about my Ballymun address I ended up using one belonging to my uncle who was stationed with the army at Arbour Hill Barracks. So I put down Arbour Hill as my resident address. Of course, I would not have been discriminated by an educational body because I was from Ballymun, but the self-loathing is so ingrained in you that you believe yourself to be literally the scum of the earth simply because you lived in Ballymun. Now once again, I have state, that this has changed mainly becuase Irish society has changed. Being from Ballymun carries no real stigma now.

I think what makes Ballymun better now (I have been living in Sligo for the last few years but I still have freinds and family there) is that there is a real engagement with the local community. People are being consulted and their opinions listened to. There is a sense of ownership in the process. The economy of Ireland is much more different now and there are loads of jobs in and around Ballymun. But the bottom line is there is nothing like making people feel they matter, are valued, and are part of a process. This is why the Ballymun Regeneration won’t be a repeat of the past.

Speaking of RTE and their rural reporting or eles clause – have you ever noticed that the TG4 news, even though is is paid for by all Irish taxpayers is little more than a crass lobby for rural communities west of the Shannon. Were is the reporting balance between urban and rural on TG4?

@murphaph wrote:

Pale btw, it’s the mentality of the ‘architects of Irish society’ I have a problem with, not the good folks of Mayo or wherever!

Indeed. It is not the average person who Mayo or Sligo who is anti-Dublin/Urban it is the bizzare orgaisation and egomanics which claim to represent rural Ireland – these organisation only serve the greedy farmers who have the destroyed the natual beauty of the Irish landscape.

Who do you think it was who killed off the Dublin Regional Authority which Bertie promised in 2000? Right now the Western Development Commision has more pull in Government than the 2 million residents of the East Coast.

If anybody has not read it yet, I suggest you get yourself a copy of Through Streets Broad and Narrow by Micheal Corchrane. The Book is about the once world-class tram system of Dublin (carried 60 million passengers in it’s final years and was closed so the Western Rail Corridor could be kept open for a another few years of empty trains through the West of Ireland) – within the pages of the book is a social history of how the Dev years viewed Dublin with no more importance in terms of its infrastructural needs, than the country hamlets of Clare and Mayo. Even if you are not interested in trams or trains – the book is a collossal read and great social history of were it all went wrong for urban Ireland during the mid to late 20th century. Even down the Dublin United Tramway company being forced to issue bi-lingual tickets (this was a company which had it all, zonal fares, integration with buses and late night services back in the 1920’s). The DUTC almost wnt bankrupt ordering new and adpating their ticketing machines so they could have “An Lar” on them in a Gaelic font.

It still goes on today as your signs proves. The Indo recent declaration of war on the Luas was a manifestation on this rural agri-elite and their agenda. “How dare they build something which enhances urban living!” The Indo journalists are nearly all farmers sons and daughters and hence their open hostility to Luas. Part of a cultural war waged by the pampered agri-elite on urban Ireland.

Is this Archiseek Ireland or Archiseek Anglo-Saxon Dublin? I am not sure what much of the above has to do with Ballymun – seems like a general outpouring of disgust with anyone who happens to live outside the Pale and who believes that the Irish language – as our national language – is a hindrance to the development of a proper public-transport network.

Oddly enough, this is exactly the opinion delivered by Sir Edmund Spenser (although he never mentioned public transport) in his great Elizabethan diatribe against Irish ‘savages’ (for those of you interested enough in enlightening yourselves, please see the following link: http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/veue1.html – you may surprise yourself by seeing how close your views are to those of a British colonialist who effectively celebrated the idea of killing of the Irish).